The Role
The hard problem in robotics is not building a compelling prototype. It is making robotic systems deployable, repeatable, and economically useful in the real world.
The Forward Deployed Research Engineer is a new kind of role at Menlo. It combines the strengths of a Forward Deployed Engineer and a Research Engineer. You will work directly on real customer problems, but you will not stop at integration or customization. You will use deployment pressure to uncover missing capabilities, design evaluations, collect data, adapt models, and turn one-off field learnings into reusable product and research improvements.
This is not a support role. It is not solutions engineering. It is a deployment-native R&D role for people who want to stay close to reality and build the abstractions that make the next deployment easier.